Since writing the two columns on the "terrific kid" awards, I've received a bunch of emails telling the latest story of woe from different schools. The emails seem to be divided into categories roughly like this:
1. We're upset because everyone gets an award. The grade 8 graduation ceremonies at my child's school took two hours because of all the awards--and one child got 34! Why can't they give out fewer?
or
2. It's always the bullies and the loud mouths who win the citizenship awards, because they talk loudest on their own behalf. The quiet kids who are just kind in the background don't win anything, and it's infuriating!
Now I homeschool, so I haven't seen this firsthand except through my nieces and nephews and the stories fo my friends whose children are in school. So I'm curious about two things: how bad is it at your school, and what is the alternative?
What's happened during the self-esteem movement in schools, I think, is that schools have decided that the best way to motivate kids is to give them awards, and the more awards the better! It used to be that we had the Math Award and the English Award and the Athlete Award, and that was it. But now the awards get multiplied so that more kids can win awards--although what usually happens is that one child still wins about 90% of the academic awards. Introducing more academic awards doesn't cause more children to win, it just causes one child to win more, resulting in even more trophies that will get thrown out as soon as she moves out.
I can understand the frustration parents have when the same child, or often the same family, wins the Citizenship Awards all the time, but what's the alternative? I'm not sure just passing it around to different kids every year improves the situation. Personally, I'd be more in favour of scrapping a lot of the awards entirely and, to teach citizenship, getting the kids behind one big project you do all year, like raising money for a Haitian orphanage, or writing letters to soldiers overseas, or soemthing. And then, at the end of the year, you have a slide show of what the class has done so that everyone feels like they have been a part of something important.
In other words, I'm not sure the slanted nature of the decisions regarding who gets what award is really the problem. I think it's the philosophy that we need to be giving all these awards in the first place. The smartest kid knows he or she is the smartest kid. Give them the "top marks" award and leave it at that. They need to be commended for that, sure, but it's humiliating when one kid wins 15 of them. And as for all the other awards, what's the point?
Perhaps I'm a fuddy-duddy and I'm depriving children of the thrill of winning something, but I do think we've over-hyped children's achievements. I remember one 10-year-old I know having her picture in the paper for drawing a great picture for Earth Day, that won the district's competition. She doesn't even believe in Earth Day particularly. She did it because she was required to in school. And her picture wasn't even good. It was randomly chosen. But there she was, pleased as punch, to have her picture in the paper.
I have no problem recognizing kids when they truly do extraordinary things, but I don't know that school is the best way to do that. Often churches and service clubs are better at that. I know one boy, for instance, who single-handedly raised tens of thousands of dollars from all the elementary schools in his town to build dormitories for the Kenyan orphanage we support. The Rotary Club ended up giving him an honorary award, and that makes sense to me.
One of the books I'm reading this summer is one my daughter has already read, Do Hard Things by Alex and Brett Harris.
Here's their thesis: we have such low expectations on teens. We think they're all going to rebel, and waste time, and veg in front of the TV, and nothing is further from the truth. Teens can change the world by discovering their gifts and passions and using them for God in these years when they don't have mortgages and families to take care of. I love it! It's something I can totally get behind, and I'll have to give you a full review when I'm through.
I think kids should be doing extraordinary things. I think they should be trying to change the world, or at least their corner of it. They should be grappling with injustice, because kids understand it at a visceral level perhaps in a way better than we adults do.
But giving kids awards for silly things that they should be doing anyway does nothing to encourage this; on the contrary, it just encourages mediocrity. We think kids are extraordinary when they get a B in math! We think kids are extraordinary for drawing pictures for Earth Day, even though it's a school assignment! We think kids are extraordinary for saying please and thank you! And then we wonder why kids think they don't have to try in this life.
I would rather we stop giving awards and simply encouraged kids towards excellence. Yes, let's recognize milestones, like graduating from elementary school, or turning 13, or hitting 16. But let's do it in a way taht encourages them to be who God made them, not that says, "you have arrived. We are proud of you just for breathing." That's not enough.
Not every kid is going to throw themselves into combatting world hunger, but some may. Some may organize the 30 Hour Famine through World Vision. Some may organize a penny drive to buy toys for a missions team going to an orphanage. Some may simply decide to befriend the new immigrant kids on the block. These are important things because they represent character issues, and it is parents and churches who should be recognizing this, not necessarily schools.
So I wish schools would stop with silly awards, and get back to teaching. And then maybe we, as parents, could reclaim our proper role in teaching character and recognizing it and acknowledging it when we see it. That, I think, would make me more at peace with the world.
What's your story? How do awards work at your child's school? Has your child ever done something extraordinary? Has your school ever done anything dumb? Let's talk about it!
Yesterday I was listening to the radio and was reminded of that fact that the people with the highest self-esteem tend to be those on death row. Those who feel best about themselves are often criminals. Indeed, that's WHY they're criminals. They think they are the best, that they are special, and thus they don't have to live by other people's rules.
Our society has become completely sideswiped by the self-esteem movement. If kids are having problems, it must be because they don't feel good enough about themselves, the argument goes. So if they're having trouble learning their multiplication facts, let's work on helping them feel special, rather than helping them learn that 7 * 8 = 56. (do you know the trick to remembering that? It's just 5-6-7-8).
Schools have courses on boosting kids' self-esteem. All over elementary schools you see posters saying, "I'm special!". But I'm reminded of that awesome line in The Incredibles, spoken by Dash, complaining after his mother is saying that all kids are special. "That's just another way of saying that nobody is." And he's right.
I once knew a single mom who had pictures of her daughter all over the house. Now I have pictures of my kids all over the house, too, but this was almost pathological. They were often set up as if they were shrines to this girl, who was definitely not special. I don't like to be mean, but she wasn't bright, she wasn't athletic, she wasn't musical, she wasn't pretty, but most of all, she was a downright miserable and annoying child to be with, especially as she hit 10 and 11.
I'm not one who believes that everybody has to be extraordinary in some area. I think we all do have strengths, but I think character is far more important than innate giftings. Develop love and compassion and integrity and responsibility, and you will be a special person. And anyone can develop these character traits. A person who is motivated, hard-working, and kind, even if they're not extraordinarily bright, will go further in life than a person who is brilliant but lazy, mean, and arrogant.
How we raise our kids, then, needs to take this into account. Don't always go telling them they're special or they will stop trying. If every tiny bit of effort they put in is amazing, then how will they ever strive for more? New York Magazine wrote an article about this a while back, looking at why kids who were bright often underperformed. Here's what researchers found:
For the past ten years, psychologist Carol Dweck and her team at Columbia (she’s now at Stanford) studied the effect of praise on students in a dozen New York schools. Her seminal work—a series of experiments on 400 fifth-graders—paints the picture most clearly.
Dweck sent four female research assistants into New York fifth-grade classrooms. The researchers would take a single child out of the classroom for a nonverbal IQ test consisting of a series of puzzles—puzzles easy enough that all the children would do fairly well. Once the child finished the test, the researchers told each student his score, then gave him a single line of praise. Randomly divided into groups, some were praised for their intelligence. They were told, “You must be smart at this.” Other students were praised for their effort: “You must have worked really hard.”
Why just a single line of praise? “We wanted to see how sensitive children were,” Dweck explained. “We had a hunch that one line might be enough to see an effect.”
Then the students were given a choice of test for the second round. One choice was a test that would be more difficult than the first, but the researchers told the kids that they’d learn a lot from attempting the puzzles. The other choice, Dweck’s team explained, was an easy test, just like the first. Of those praised for their effort, 90 percent chose the harder set of puzzles. Of those praised for their intelligence, a majority chose the easy test. The “smart” kids took the cop-out.
The most important thing you can instill in your kids is character. So praise character issues, not innate abilities. They didn't do anything to achieve those innate abilities; the praise should come with what they then do with it.
As a homeschooling mom, I know that if my kids don't try hard, they don't get rewarded. If they try and still can't do it, that doesn't matter at all to me. The important thing is the effort.
Be careful of what you praise your kids for. Don't praise them for being "smart", or they may easily stop trying. Don't praise them for being "beautiful", because then the emphasis in their life is misdirected. Praise them instead for being honest, for trying hard, for showing creativity, for being polite.
All of this, of course, is in moderation. I do tell my girls they're beautiful (as does their father), because that's important when teenage girls hit puberty. But they know that's not their main characteristic.
The idea of praising kids just for WHO THEY ARE is nonsense and makes no sense theologically. We are fallen creatures. Anything good in us is from God. Let's instead praise kids for WHOSE they are and for what they've done about it. Tell them God loves them. Tell them God chose them for something great, and that He has a plan for their lives where they can show others His love. Praise them for acting in godly ways. And if they happen to be brilliant or gifted at something, reinforce that that gift is from God, and with the gift comes the responsibility to use it for Him.
If we all did that, our jails would likely empty out, because we wouldn't be raising narcissists. We'd be raising good kids with an accurate opinion of their abilities. Wouldn't that be better?
Tell me what you think! Have you been overwhelmed by the self-esteem movement at your child's school? What do you praise in your child? I'd love to know!
Well, that's a two-edged sword, isn't it? Too often we praise kids for absolutely nothing at all, and then they grow up in this bubble thinking they're wonderful and everyone will always think they're wonderful.
When they get a job and they're not praised for how well they run the copy machine, they wonder what's wrong.
Here's what I wrote a while back about how being ordinary isn't so bad after all:
When my daughter Rebecca was two I was a nervous wreck. The only words she said weren’t even words—they were animal sounds. She called a dog “woof woof”. She called a cat “meow”. She could do a mean barnyard pig. But she couldn’t say “want juice”. I had been so proud when she was the first in my little moms’ group to walk, but now she was letting me down. I wanted her to be exceptional, and she was, well, ordinary.
If we can produce a child who is exceptional, we figure that reflects well on us. Our kids become our measuring sticks, and that puts a lot of pressure on them to excel. Yet I think most of this pressure is misguided. After all, in the long run, does it matter who was toilet trained first, or who first mastered writing their name? Statistically some of us will give birth to geniuses, but most of us will not. Some of us will have musical prodigies, or sports prodigies, but most of us will have those who may be able to hum a tune or kick a ball, but that’s about it.
All kids have one or two things they do really well, and identifying these skills and giving our kids the chance to develop them can give a sense of pride and accomplishment. But nobody has to do everything really well. In fact, maybe we should change our expectations. Maybe being wonderfully, delightfully middle of the pack should be perfectly fine.
You can read the rest here. But to sum up, we don't need kids to be geniuses, though there's nothing wrong with that. We want to praise them when they show good character and good judgment, not just when they do something that will impress others. Don't put pressure on them to be great; praise them for simply acting good. Then they'll have a more realistic impression of themselves and what's important!
About Me: I'm a Christian author of a bunch of books, and a frequent speaker to women's groups and marriage conferences. Best of all, I love homeschooling my daughters, Rebecca and Katie. And I love to knit. Preferably simultaneously.
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